Why “Ghostbusters 3″ Bucks the Bad Movie-Game Trend

The team that brought you the “Ghostbusters” franchise is hard at work finishing the movie trilogy. But before the announcement for the third film, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis put in just as much work bookending the ghoul-fighting quartet’s story with “Ghostbusters: The Game” from Dallas developer Terminal Reality.

“When I first brought the idea to [Terminal], I told them guys you’re going to build the third movie,” says Mr. Aykroyd.

Movie-based games, however, have a spotty history, starting in 1982 when “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” game for the Atari 2600 hit store shelves. Based on the Steven Spielberg film, the game’s short development time led to an atrocious game that posted a huge loss for its publisher Atari and earned its place as one of the worst videogames of all time. Since then, games tied to films have been viewed with skepticism.

The biggest reason why movie-based games are so difficult to pull off is the disconnect between the game development and film development process. As games take longer to development, teams are often only given a year to produce a quality title. That leads to poor gameplay as the review scores for last year’s “Iron Man” can attest.

The “Ghostbusters” game is a moment of redemption for Atari. Originally Terminal Reality pitched a different game to Sierra Entertainment, the game’s initial publisher, before being told that the Ghostbusters franchise might make a better fit. However, when Sierra’s parent Vivendi Games merged with Activision, the game was tabled while Terminal looked for a new publisher. Atari quickly stepped in, seeing an opportunity.

“Overall, there’s too much risk in the “see the movie, play the game” approach,” says Atari CEO Jim Wilson. “We’ve always thought to approach the franchise to see if you can expand upon that to further the experience.”

To do so, Mr. Aykroyd was active in the development of the game, tweaking the language that the Ghostbusters use to describe their work and advising developers. Because the game was not tied to a film, the developers had time to add extra polish and, more importantly, add more voices to the film, such as Bill Murray’s.

“We got to fly under the radar a little bit,” says Drew Haworth, creative director for the game. Atari took a similar approach with “The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena” which featured Vin Diesel although no movie has yet been announced tied to the film franchise.

The game itself echoes much of the humor of the original series. The dialogue, written by Mr. Aykroyd and Harold Ramis along with others, mimics the repartee the films are known for. The only difficulty was matching the actors’ schedules. Bill Murray, in particular, was hard to pin down. “I’m not saying it was annoying, but we chased him all over the country,” says Mr. Haworth.